Border newspaper stops covering cartels after repeated attacks

Escalating cartel violence in Mexico has led to bouts of self-censorship among journalists fearing reprisals, but few so prominently as Nuevo Laredo’s El Mañana, which has decided to quit reporting on local cartel violence altogether.

Two years later, armed men shot up the Nuevo Laredo office, leaving a reporter paralyzed. Afterward, the paper installed bulletproof glass and fortified walls.
A year ago this month, men again shot into the office with assault rifles and tossed a homemade grenade into the building. No one was injured.

… Ramon Cantú Deándar, the paper’s director general, said, “We won’t allow ourselves to be intimidated.” Soon afterward, El Mañana backed down, announcing plans in an editorial to “abstain, for as long as necessary, from publishing any information that is related to violent conflicts which our city and other regions of the country suffer from,” citing “lack of conditions to freely exercise journalism.”

Readers of the 16,000-circulation paper, which is also distributed in Laredo, Texas, just across the border, say they have noticed the change. But even those unhappy with the changes don’t feel free to speak up about it. “There’s no freedom of speech in Nuevo Laredo — if they write the truth, they kill them,” one El Mañana reader — who spoke anonymously — told the Times of the cartels.

To counteract such drastic measures, some journalists have taken to Twitter to get the word out on cartel violence. Texas Observer reporter Melissa del Bosque, KGBT-TV interactive manager Sergio Chapa and University of Texas-Brownsville professor Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera discussed such work at a South by Southwest panel in March of this year. Watch the first of six parts here.